How Fitness Affects Your Finances

We sometimes try to separate our lives into various boxes. There’s the social box, the faith box, the work box, and also the finance box and the fitness box. Though we may try to approach each area of our lives as if it were in a separate box, the reality is that many of these boxes are actually connected. This is especially true of the fitness and personal finance boxes.

Though it seems like an odd combination, there’s a lot of overplay between the two, especially in the way that fitness can affect your finances.

Fitness increases your energy level, helping you to do your job

Our ability to perform our work is intimately affected by our levels of health and fitness. In order to earn a living we need to have a sense of well-being and a minimum level of energy. Fitness helps with both.

By maintaining a regular exercise program, you feel better about yourself because you have more energy for whatever it is you need to do. Cardiovascular fitness, in particular, is helpful here. It improves blood flow and the functioning of virtually your entire body, and that improves your performance. The better you feel, the more you’ll be able accomplish, and ultimately the higher your income will be.

A higher energy level will also help you to make forward progress. As you improve your energy level, you’ll be in a position to take on new challenges more easily. This will include career challenges.

Creating a healthy diversion produces greater balance

The financial aspect of life has very long arms â“ it can affect nearly every other area of your life. It’s not at all hard to become obsessed with our financial condition especially at the extremes. If you’re doing very well, it’s easy to obsess over your success and attaining more of it. If you’re going through financially difficult times, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in them that you can’t see anything but.

Actively pursuing fitness provides you with an important diversion that can keep you focused on other areas of your life. There’s something about connecting with yourself physically that is so basic that it can pull you away even from those areas of life that you are obsessing over. Once you do, it takes you away from your most immediate problems and helps you to improve your perspective.

Better health reduces medical expenses and health insurance premiums

Probably the most direct benefit of fitness on your finances is the fact that it improves your health. That ultimately lowers your medical expenses. Because you feel better, you’ll be healthier, and that will mean fewer trips the doctor and less need for medications.

Better health can also help to reduce stress. When you feel better, you just feel less stressed. And if you focus at least some of your energy on improving your career and your finances, you will balance out your life which will lower your stress levels even more.

As your level of health improves, you may even see your health insurance premiums drop. This can happen if you see long-term improvements in areas were you need ongoing therapies, such as the use of blood pressure medications.

If you can overcome yourself you’re ready for anything

For most of us, the biggest obstacle we face each day is the person staring back at us in the mirror. We often think we are unable to face difficult challenges, and that thinking often flows from the fact that we sense a lack of control over ourselves. For example, if you are overweight this probably makes perfect sense to you. Your weight is by itself a constant obstacle that you may fee that you cannot overcome.

If you can be successful dealing with problems on the most personal level, you will be able to better face external challenges, such as financial problems or career issues. A certain amount of confidence comes from being able to control and improve yourself, and it will flow over everything else you do including your finances.

In a real way, adopting a better fitness routine can help you to be ready for whatever else you are facing in life.

With backgrounds in both accounting and the mortgage industry, Kevin Mercadante is professional personal finance blogger, and the owner of OutOfYourRut.com, a website about careers, business ideas, money and more. A committed Christian, he lives in Atlanta with his wife and two teenage kids.

With backgrounds in both accounting and the mortgage industry, Kevin Mercadante is professional personal finance blogger, and the owner of OutOfYourRut.com, a website about careers, business ideas, money and more. A committed Christian, he lives in Atlanta with his wife and two teenage kids.